Website redesign and rebranding is an effective strategy adopted by modern businesses to reach extensive audience, generate more leads and increase revenue. A website is a virtual face of a business and so, it should be improved and redesigned as technology progresses and as business grows. Websites should remain in the state of consistent improvement and development, and this can be accomplished with website redesign strategy. It is not only important to carry out the redesign process in the right way but is also important to avoid committing mistakes.
We have come up with 10 common mistakes that must be avoided while executing your website redesign project.
- Ignoring responsive web design:
If you do not have a website that can be viewed on mobiles and other gadgets, then you are missing a big fortune. According to statistics, around 60% of searches on Google are coming from mobile devices. If your website does not have responsive web design, then it means that you are pushing away a significant segment of potential customers. Having Responsive web design increases the usability of your website on different devices. This brings in more visitors to your website, who can be converted into potential customers in the future.
- Not updating Outdated content:
Businesses spend time to revitalize their website’s visual appearance and the platform it is built on, but they ignore updating outdated site content. Unique, quality, relevant and updated content is the most important component of any website. If you update your website regularly with fresh content, it results in frequent indexing. The more quality content you update, the better your opportunity to become authorized in Google’s eyes. When you gain a strong authority, visitors begin to trust you and become loyal to you.
- Not using 301 Redirect:
What is 301 Redirection? 301 Redirect is a permanent redirect that transfers 90% to 99% of link juicefrom your old URL to the new one. Whether you are changing your site map or restructuring your website URLs, you can set up 301 redirects to ensure that you are not missing valuable SEO juice. If you fail to do this, not only your website’s ranking gets dropped, but you may also end up losing your site’s visitors due to “404 – page not found” error message.
- Not considering SEO:
Most people focus only on the specific aspects during website redesigning and they ignore SEO’s best practices. Search engine algorithm on website’s speed, performance, mobile friendliness and HTTPS is being updated consistently. If you fail to stay up to date on these factors, your website may lose SEO influence, rankings, organic traffic and sales.
- Overlooking performance:
The visitors will stay on those websites that load quickly. If your website’s speed is not up to the satisfactory level, the visitor may switch over to your competitor’s site to find something that they are looking for. Google has also placed emphasis on the website’s speed and performance. So, it is highly recommended to ignore bloated templates that could affect the performance of the website while redesigning.
- Underestimating Quality Design and User Friendliness:
Most companies fail to appreciate the positive impacts of having a quality design. A quality web design does not only mean aesthetic appeal, but also represents user friendliness. Crafting a website that meets your business goals and your visitors’ needs is extremely important. You can achieve a quality design only if you choose the template from strategic viewpoint.
- Not benchmarking:
It is quite impossible to measure the success of your redesigned website unless you benchmark your performance. In order to track and improve your performance, you should gather certain details such as average organic session, users, bounce rate, order value, revenue and visibility score within the timeframe of past 12 months. By comparing these values with the data obtained after launching your redesigned website, you can track its performance accurately.
- Removing pages/categories:
If you have decided to remove a page or a few categories that bring in a decent amount of traffic to your website, you can redirect the visitors to another page. Simply removing pages tempts search engine to throw “404 Page not found error”. Instead, you can consider 301 Redirection, which helps in transferring link juice from the removed page to the redirected page. Moreover, you can also prevent backlinks from getting converted to dead-links with the help of redirection.
- Ignoring keyword optimization:
Most of the brands ignore keyword optimization on header tags, title tags, alt tags, content and Meta description while re-launching the website. You must come up with a clear mapping strategy for keyword and must recognize which page must rank higher for particular keyword. This also gives you an idea on keyword priorities.
- Changing Google analytics code:
You do not have to change Google Analytics Code while redesigning your website so that you can easily compare pre and post data after launching the site. By comparing bounce rate, visitors, sessions counts etc you can track its performance more accurately.
By now, you might have a clear idea on mistakes that should be avoided while redesigning a website. These are simple to follow tricks to ensure success of any business.
If you have something to share, let us know in the comments.
Aashath Kaamil
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- 10 Common Website Redesign and Rebranding Mistakes to Avoid - August 19, 2016